“I hated myself for being depressed, I hated feeling depressed, I hated feeling. I was very good at disassociating from emotion completely. And all the time I was second-guessing myself, saying something and then hating myself for saying it. I didn’t understand what was happening apart from the fact that I didn’t want to be alive anymore,” Delevingne told Net-A-Porter magazine.

“I wish I could have given myself a hug. I wish I’d known that I was still in there somewhere, that I wasn’t my own worst enemy, that I wasn’t trapped. That if you can hold on for dear life – because being a teenager can feel like you’re on a rollercoaster to hell, that’s what it honestly felt like to me – you can get through it,” she added.

Delevingne used to feel as though she had “something dark within” her which she couldn’t seem to rid herself of, and it didn’t help when bullies would brand her as a boy because she had short hair.

“When I tried to talk to people about it, they wouldn’t want to understand. So many of my friends would say: ‘How can you feel like that?’ and, ‘But you’re so lucky,’ and I’d be like, ‘I know, trust me, I know. I know I’m the luckiest girl in the world, I understand all of these things, and I wish I could appreciate it. There is just something dark within me I cannot seem to shake.’

“That whole thing of being called frigid, and being flat-chested… I felt alienated and alone, because I was like, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I always wanted people to love me, so I never got angry with them; I turned my anger on to myself.

“Instead of using my sword and shield to protect myself, I just put my shield up and stabbed myself. If I wore the clothes that I liked, with my short hair, everyone would think that I was a boy. I hated it. Even though I looked like a boy and acted like a boy, I wasn’t a boy,” she added.